Current trends in glycobiology tend toward concerns in multicellular organisms where physiological consequences of glycosylation can be viewed in the contexts of development and environmental interactions. C. elegans is well suited for such investigations and will be a good model system for study of the orthologues of human genes involved in the growing number of congenital disorders of glycosylation. This worm is considered a prototypic parasitic nematode and we show evidence that this is the case at the glycan level(see item 30b). t his organism is developmentally and genetically well characterized and is easily grown, providing advantages over most helminthic parasites. The project proposed will develop the C. elegans system to properly address glycan structural questions as they relate to biological problems in this simple animal. Using state of the art techniques we will continue development of a general scheme that is useful to investigate the worm throughout its life cycle as well as present a holistic overview of the nematode. The system will have the capacity to investigate a wide range of glycosylation mutants such as squash vulva (sqv) and surface (srf) mutants, which we plan to investigate.